From the Editor

On March 12, 1999, Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Hungary were admitted to NATO. After two hundred years
of partitions, uprisings, wars, destruction, colonialism, foreign
occupation, fear, brief independence - a period of peace and
political security is finally in sight. Poles, Czechs and Hungarians
think of themselves as returning to the Western fold. For them, March
12, 1999 symbolizes a return to normalcy. They can now engage in
domesticity and bickering in their parliaments over issues of policy,
economy and the ways to fix things.

Barring unforeseen circumstances such as a major economic crash in
Europe, the anchoring of East Central European security in NATO
foretells a happy period for the countries involved. Fifty years
after NATO had been created, the three Central European nations
finally have a cause to celebrate.

Maria Dabrowska's novel Nights and Days (Noce i
dnie, 1932-34) is in many ways an icon of Polish traditions. The
Niechcices and the Ostrzenskis are ordinary and imperfect people who
tried to carve out for themselves a semblance of normalcy in an area
of the world coveted by colonialist powers. Owing to these
circumstances, the Polish petty nobility failed: the novel ends with
the outbreak of World War I and the loss of all property by the
already-impoverished Mrs. Barbara Niechcic. The loss of property to
fire and sword has been monotonously common in Polish history, and
its effects on the fabric of society have not been studied. In 1939,
people like the Niechcices and the Ostrzenskis became for the Soviets
the symbols of 'gentlemen's Poland' (panskaia Polsha, an
expression routinely used in the Soviet press of 1939-1941) that had
to be destroyed at any price. Why? Obviously there is more here than
meets the eye.

We are pleased to offer the first-ever translation into English of
the beginning of this family saga.It would make us even
happier if this fragment led one of our readers to translate the
entire novel. Dabrowska's text conveys a part of the repressed
history of Central Europe American academia is unfamiliar with. It is
also a wonderful read, comparable to the Victorian texts which
likewise envelop the world in comforting categories and explanations.
But unlike the Victorian novelists, Dabrowska presents a world that
is well ordered in spite of attempts to introduce chaos and disorder
into it. Perhaps the crux of the matter lies here: the Soviets and
the Nazis tried to destroy this kind of ordering of society. It was
not just a matter of killing off the Poles and Jews physically. They
had to be killed spiritually and intellectually, so to speak.

This issue's ride across Polish literature takes us to a period of
Polish history innocent of reflections such as those occasioned by
Dabrowska's epic. Professor Piotr Wilczek's essay on religious
debates in Jagiellonian and post-Jagiellonian Poland demonstrates not
only the forms which the pre-modern religious tolerance took in
Poland, but also is a contribution to Reformation studies in Europe.
Wilczek's essay cautions us not to employ categories of thinking
appropriate for our own time in assessing a history of another
period.

These relatively serene horizons are crossed by a book that seems
to belong to the fin-de-siecle decadence rather than to the
world of Maria Dabrowska's heroes. Yet its heroine lived at
approximately the same period of time as Dabrowska herself. She was
Stanislaw Przybyszewski's daughter, a person of considerable talent
(she wrote the play Danton on which Andrzej Wajda based his
famous movie), a drug addict and a near-suicide, and her story is
also a part of Polish reality. Last but not least, the best history
of interwar Poland by Richard M. Watt is here ably reviewed by
Professor John J. Kulczycki.